Personal Knowledge Mapping And The Concept Of
Data EmergenceSome worthwhile observations on
where previous knowledge management initiatives have gone
wrong. "Any Web site should become nothing more than a set
of raw data feeds while knowledge workers would be provided
with a personal software tool that would allow to: 1)
maintain a database of personal information. 2) selectively
share that data with anybody I choose. 3) autodiscover new
sources of content. 4) completely control how I view and
interact with the content sources I've chosen. This is the
right approach." In other words, "Content providers should
not be trying to guess how I want to interact with their
information. They should just be providing the information.
I will customize my experience as I see fit." I think
there's a lot of truth to this. Give people tools
and the freedom to use them. By Luigi Canali De Rossi,
Robin Good, November 28, 2003
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Access Barriers in AfricaPeter
Suber summarizes this nicely: "While there are many opportunities for African
universities to receive free or discounted electronic
subscriptions to scientific journals, many universities are unaware of them or
prevented from taking full advantage of them. That's the
result of an INASP survey conducted by Sara Gwynn and
revealed at a November 8 seminar of librarians at a meeting
of the West African branch of the Standing Conference of
African Universities in Accra, Ghana." By Peter Suber, Open
Access News, November 28, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]

Liability and Federated Identity: Much Ado
About Nothing?This is arcane and mysterious
business, but so it the stuff behind automated tellers, and
look at what an impact they've had. And it's pretty much
the same issue: "I guarantee you this is Sally; if I'm
wrong, I pay you." Why is this important? Well, federated
learning object repository networks are emerging, and
guarantees of identity are needed to keep the system
secure. Commercial content providers require this, because
they want to control the use of their materials. But can
one system really guarantee the identity of a user to
another. In high security, high stakes systems like
banking, sure. But learning? This article gives you a taste
of the road you will travel, if you go in that direction.
By Carol Coye Benson, Glenbrook Partners, November, 2003
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PitchPitch has launched. I'm not
sure if the launch is formal yet, but you can access the
online magazine and view three articles, including an introductory editorial by David Wiley and
Brent Lambert, an article from George Siemens on open source content in education, and one
of my articles, The Regina Declaration. Now what's really
interesting about Pitch is the peer review system. "Pitch
uses a democratic method of peer review where all readers
participate in the review process. Instead of sending
submitted articles away for 12 months of secret review by
three individuals, Pitch allows your peers to review your
work. In Pitch everyone 'pitches in' to rate papers
submitted to the journal." Kudos to David and Brent for
getting this off the ground, and my thanks to them for
letting me be a part of it. I look forward to the
discussion that will no doubt follow. By David Wiley &
Brent Lambert, Pitch, November 27, 2003
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Natural Deselection: Not Even Microsoft Will
Last Forever, but They Plan to TryGood article
advancing one theory about Microsoft's proposed DRM system
(I say 'one theory' because I think this is only an aspect
of the overall strategy, not the whole thing as the article
implies). "Imagine a remote procedure call that goes out
every time you are online. The RPC doesn't do anything but
act as a key. The call goes out to some Microsoft server,
but it is only returned if your OS and applications are
legit and up-to-date. This is how piracy goes away, and how
Microsoft plans to make more money by turning us all into
Windows subscribers whether we want to or not. We'll see it
first when you try to play a bootleg MP3 or that VCD image
downloaded from Finland, but eventually your system won't
work at all if you aren't on some kind of support contract
and Microsoft gets paid twice." By Robert X. Cringley, I,
Cringley, November 20, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]

W4
k-collectorFrom the web page: "k-collector is
an enterprise news aggregator that leverages the power of
shared topics to present new ways of finding and combining
the real knowledge in your organisation." A lot like Edu_RSS, this website aggregates RSS
feeds and displays the results as a series of topic feeds.
I like the 'what', 'where', 'who', 'when' organization of
topics (hence 'W4') - especially since I'm one of the
people listed in the 'who'. I ran into access problems
trying to explore the site, so you may have to be
persistent with this link. By Various Authors, Evectors,
November, 2003
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